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11 The War
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33 The bacteriological war is the central catastrophic event in Rooted's backstory. Taking place roughly 20 years before the game's setting (near the year 2100, with the game's FAQ referencing 2120), the war involved the deliberate use of biological agents that released deadly spores into the atmosphere. These spores spread across vast regions, rendering entire cities uninhabitable and collapsing the infrastructure of modern civilization.
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55 Aftermath
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77 In the decades following the war, nature reclaimed the abandoned urban landscape. Forests grew through crumbled buildings, roads deteriorated into overgrown trails, and wildlife returned to areas previously dominated by human activity. The result is a world where remnants of advanced technology sit alongside untamed wilderness.
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99 The spores from the war did not dissipate. They concentrated in specific areas now known as Contaminated Zones, which remain lethal to unprotected humans. These zones follow a gradient from the relatively safe forest areas, through transitional village zones, to heavily contaminated city centers.
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1111 Impact on Society
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1313 With governments and organized society destroyed, survivors formed scattered groups with competing interests. Some claimed to inhabit clean environments, while others became hostile toward outsiders. The ROTOR Corporation's autonomous robots, originally built in the 2080s, continue to operate without human direction, treating all humans as potential threats.
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1515 Players enter this world as survivors who must scavenge, craft, and build to carve out a foothold in the post-war landscape. The bacteriological war's legacy shapes every aspect of gameplay, from the Infection Mechanic to the distribution of resources and threats across the map.
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17+Timeline Anchors
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19+The bacteriological war is the central inflection point of the world's history. Surviving archive data dated to 2099 frames the events the player learns about across the run. The current world is set around 2100, roughly twenty years after the war released its spores across the landscape, making the player a survivor in a society still rebuilding from the collapse.
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21+Present-Day Consequences
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23+The war's spores still persist in heavily affected zones, especially the contaminated city core. Survivors live with the long tail of the collapse: infrastructure ruined and reclaimed by nature, pre-war machines such as the ROTOR units still operating autonomously, and isolated communities relying on salvage and rebuilt knowledge to keep going.
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25+This is the backdrop for every survival decision in the game, from picking which zone to risk for salvage to whether to invest scarce time into the lore thread that runs through landmarks like the Communication Tower.